While technically not a mud, I played Legend of the Red Dragon on a local BBS back in the day, followed closely by LORD2 which was very rogue like in how it played, it was heaps of fun and was also where i learned somewhat to code using pascal. Good old days for sure.

My first MUD was an LP Mud called Valhalla. Not the current Valhalla, this one closed in 1996/1997.

Things were pretty tough on that game - a stable connection was essential and we're talking around when 56k was super fast. The most dreaded thing was a "modem retrain" while fighting. A death took about 2 weeks to recover. Everything was black and white and when it hit 40 people online you had to wait for someone to logoff. Still, the depth of the areas and the balance of the MUD was incredible.

I started off with a couple of BBS style MUDs in 1991/1992. At this point I even got into coding them, and sold a number of modules/addons to the creators of two BBS door MUD-type games (if I recall their names, I think they were Legends and Illusions). By either 1993 or 1994, a BBSer told me about MUDs, and how they were so much better than BBS door game MUDs.

I do not recall the first true MUD I played, but I think it might have been Genesis. Things I recall were you either had to kill, or got a bonus for killing, whatever mob killed you. There was a constant battle between two sides (I think good and evil) who were sacrificing items at some temple. There was constantly some dude in the center of town running a bot who would teleport you back to town or buff you if you sent him the right message in a tell.

The first MUDs I played heavily were Darkwind and Realmsmud. I played them to death.

Then I got back into creating, and from that point forward I have mostly just created MUDs. Though I did return to both Darkwind and Realmsmud a few times, and have played a few other MUDs here and there.

I don't recall the name of the first one I ever played way back in January 1997. I only recall that there was no color, it was a level-based H&S and that it had "lurker" as part of the telnet address. I played it only once that first weekend for about a half hour and never again.

I would toy with the idea of playing a MUD again, and frequently looked over information on various games without actually creating a character and playing them, for the next year and a half before mentioning them to a friend of mine over lunch. He had never heard of MUDs so after lunch we went to the library and started searching for a MUD to play. We tried out a few before finding one that we liked. That first MUD I played consistently was the H&S MUD Necromium (March 1999 through December 2002).

In the fall of that year Necromium went down for a few weeks so we started looking at other games. My friend discovered Harshlands as he was familiar with table-top Harn. It was the first RPI I had ever seen or played. Played it for a very short time in November 1999 (my character died in less than an hour) and didn't try it again for a few weeks. Ended up playing nonstop from December 1999 through June 19, 2007.

Star Wars MUSH, in 91/92. It's been a long while so the specifics escape me, but it was there that I first started tinkering with MU* code, and then officially switched hats from player to programmer (after learning C) at the Thanksgiving '93 release of Merc 2.2.

My first Mud in around 1996 was Age of Chivalry, which closed down years ago.

In retrospect, it must have been a rather crappy mud, mostly stock and very unstable, it used to crash about twice a day. But I loved it to death, had lots of fun and made lots of friends.
I was what is known a 'trouble-maker' there, but I also built for AoC, starting out with my own Clan HQ. I was totally inexperienced, but got some good tutoring, and almost immediately realised that building was my vocation.

After a pretty intense year, some of the staff members in AoC tired of the rather arrogant owner, and decided to start their own game, which became 4 Dimensions. I was recruited by my old tutor to build there, and when she dropped out for RL reasons some months later, I took over as Head Builder.

AoC and 4D are the only muds I have played for any length of time, and I never really played in 4D either, except to playtest new areas. It's a choice one has to make.

Hahaha. I'm going to tell him that story right now. 12+ years later he still plays a couple hours a day.

One incident I remember also involving a young Wyden, is there is a certain place, in a cave near one of the big cities (trying to respect your help area rules) and in that place there is another smaller cave with a boulder blocking the entrance. We (that is Myself, Wyden and one other warrior) were luring people into the cave telling them about a secret in there and giving them all kinds of false leads, all the time pushing the boulder back into place as they searched in vain.

It was then just a case of mocking them outrageously on the guild channel as they pleaded to be let out.

I am sure that boulder has now been fixed so it can be moved from both sides, or open only :-)

Pretty sure it was Dawn of Time back in 97 or so. I used to be big on mIRC back then and DOT had a IRC client they used. I originally connected through IRC and was playing around for a few days. Then I discovered mud clients like zmud and I downloaded zmud and eventually bought it. The rest is history.

Though I tried several, including Genocide a pure PK mud, the first I actually played on for awhile was Epic back in 1992. Then from there I moved to Rivers of Mud (before Alanader released ROM) and then to River of Mud 2 for a bit. Those were some fun times!